Journal Article

Trying television by candlelight

Kesson, Andy

2015

Overview

The opening of the Wanamaker together with the renewed commitment of the RSC Swan auditorium to the early modern canon heralded a new era for Shakespeare's contemporaries onstage. [...]when Aebischer and Prince ask \"what is being forgotten when Shakespeare's contemporaries move into spaces-whether on shelves or on stages-hitherto reserved for Shakespearean performances\" (10), we need to remember that though the Wanamaker playhouse, in its first two seasons, was explicitly reserved as a space predominantly for plays contemporary to but, crucially, not written by Shakespeare, it was nevertheless a playhouse built by a company named after Shakespeare himself. Television audiences may have had difficulty, however, understanding characters' relations to one another in crowd scenes, as with Ferdinand's first entrance, and Bosola's opening conversation with Antonio and Delio was filmed in close up and therefore denied the audience the reaction of the men to whom he is grandstanding. When does he identify his familial relationships with the Duchess and Ferdinand, his past histories with Bosola or Julia, his curiously marginal place in his sister's court in the first act, his even less certain part in the plot to punish her, his tendency to dominate the stage despite his absence of dialogue, while paradoxically lurking to the side of the stage as well as the story? Since these questions all concern the ways an actor responds to a character's refusal or disinclination to respond, how might these challenges to early modern performance practice play out in a modern production and its representation in televised form? Like his diction, Webster's dramaturgy is distinctive, and the first act in particular sets up a series of interlocking scenes in which the stage represents multiple locations within a single court and repeatedly engages with the pragmatics of watching, in which the act of observation-of seeing and being seen-almost obsessively concerns identity.

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Subject: Arterton, Gemma / Gurr, Andrew / Television / Wanamaker, Sam